Phil Bradley's weblog

Pirated eBooks and how libraries can reduce it

via www.mediabistro.com

This is a really interesting article on why people pirate eBooks - thanks to Shirley Burnham for pointing it out to me. It's been around for a couple of months now, but if you haven't seen it, I would recommend it. The article links to various comments and explanations as to why people pirate eBooks, and I've included them below and then given a librarian's take on them

I’ve pirated electronic versions of books I already own physically.

OK, so this person clearly wants to have access to specific books that he's already got copies of. It's a bit like taking a copy of a CD that you own so that you can put it on your MP3 player. I absolutely get that, and can see why it's tempting. However, if the eBook was available in the library, so that the person could get hold of it whenever they wanted to, surely that's a winner all around? The person gets the book to read again (or who knows - simply to check out and re-read a paragraph), the library gets another user, and the publisher wins as well.

I limit myself to pirating things that are out-of-print or otherwise unavailable through a legal digital outlet

Well, I'm guessing that for most of us, a library, with access to eBooks is a legal digital outlet isn't it? So once again, the reader gets the book he wants, when he wants it, the library gets another user, and the publisher gets to see someone else reading their book.

I’m poor and I like to read, but I can’t pirate food, so I pirate everything else.

OK, so if the eBook is available for free in the library, she can just go and borrow it from there. Another win-win scenario. Moreover, once she can see that there are plenty of books available, she's going to read more and more of them.

The library rarely has the books I want to read

If the publisher let the library have the eBooks to lend to people, maybe they wouldn't pirate so many of them?

I only pirate textbooks from school … They are ridiculously priced an I have a hard enough time paying tuition

Again, the more expensive the book, the more likely it is to be pirated - stands to reason. Yet a library is one place that students will go time and time again, and if they can get the text book they need, that's a book that isn't pirated. Publishers are not helping students here, they are actively hindering them.

If the ebook is more expensive than the paper-version I sometimes pirate it out of annoyance

The pricing model is crazy - that person is quite right. However, what about when the eBook is free? No need to pirate a copy of it then.

pirating also lets me sample things i would not be willing to pay money for up front

People want to try authors and genres out. That's why they come to a library. If they can use the library to try out a book, they may find that they like it so much they'll go and buy a copy. Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot over this.

I think every single one of those key reasons why people pirate books is a key reason why publishers need to work with libraries. We can help REDUCE piracy, which in turn will INCREASE sales of books. The harder that publishers make to legally borrow books, the more that they will be pirated, and the less money they will make in the long run.

 

MillionShortItOn! - MillionShort vs Google

via www.millionshortiton.com

There seems to be something of a rash of blind searchtastings going on right now. The latest is Millionshort V Google. I've written about Millionshort before - it cuts out the top million sites, giving you an interesting new perspective on what you find. You can now try it out against Google. Since the same sites come up on both sets of results I'm not entirely sure where the millionshort element comes into play, but try it out if you have 5 minutes. It's a 3 round game - MillionShort won one, Google another and the third was a draw, but Millionshort decided that it had won. Not sure about that, but worth trying anyways.

WolframAlpha investigates your Facebook data

WolframAlpha, the computational search engine has added a fun bit of functionality - it can now delve into your Facebook account (only with your permission obviously) and it can give you a whole bunch of interesting facts, such as:

Exactly how old you are

Status updates, posted links and posted photographs as a bar chart - I'm almost exactly a 50/50 split between status updates and links, with a teeny percentage of photographs throw in for good measure. I also seem to post status updates most often on sunday evenings, which came as a surprise to me.

Average post length (words and characters), total likes, total comments, word frequencies, signficant words (also available as a basic word cloud), most liked post, most like photograph, most commented on post, top commentators, checkins, weekly app activity, interface activity by device....

[Deep breath]

Friends genders, friends relationship statuses, ages, oldest friend, youngest friend, friend locations, spoken languages, religious and political beliefs, birthdays, common names (Sarah in my case, with 7 friends sharing it), friends with most mutual friends, and friend networks!

Huge amount of information, although it's all culled from a relatively small sample, both of posts and friends, so I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is overall. However, it's a fun tool to play with. If you want to try it, I think this WolframAlpha Facebook link should do the trick for you.

 

A few Google tricks

Just in case you thought you knew all of the different things that you can do with Google, here's one or two that you may not have previously discovered.

A movie filmography. Just type in the actor that interests you followed by movies and you'll get a band across the top of the screen with a list of them. Once you've found the one that you want, click on it, and Google will then display all that you'll ever need to know about it. Here's an example from one of my favourites, Christina Ricci:

It's slightly annoying, because I can't really see any logic behind the listing - you'd think by date would be the sensible course, but apparently not. You can do the same for favourite musicians, with a search like: rick wakeman albums but it's in no way a comprehensive listing at all. Doesn't work for authors though, which is quite irritating.

Release dates. If you need to know the release date for a movie or a game, just type it in, followed by release date (no phrase searching required).

Attached numbers. What I mean by this, is anything that might have a number attached (doh!), such as a birth or death date, height of a building, population of a place, that sort of thing. Try john lennon birth for example and Google will come right back with the details you need. Alternatively, try death instead of birth, or london population works well, as does nelsons column height.

Quick translation needed? Just go for something like translate librarian to german and you'll get an instant answer. Need more than just a word? No problem - it will do phrases just as easily.

Play around, and have fun!

New Twitter widget

 

Twitter has produced a new widget, which allows you to embed material into a blog or a webpage. Nothing particularly new or exciting in that, but what they've done is draw all the options together in one place, so we've got the option for tweets from a person or a search query for example. There are options for choosing size and style, and you can also choose a filtering system to (hopefully) block out any profanity. The widget is very easy to use, but rather hidden. Log into your Twitter account, choose 'settings' and then 'widgets'. It's all self explanatory. I've chosen to create a widget for the CILIP 'Big Day' held last week, and you can see a screenshot below. You can have lots of widgets, and can manage them from the same widget option.

Rollyo closes its doors

Sad to say that Rollyo has closed down. Rollyo - short for 'roll your own' was a web based resource that allowed you to create your own search engine based on up to 25 websites that you defined for yourself. It wasn't necessary to register to use it, which made it very handy, and it was one of the sites that I pointed people towards.

However, all is not lost since there are two alternatives that you might want to consider - Google Custom Search Engines and Blekko. The Google option allows you to create a list of websites, folders or pages that you can then use as your search universe. Google will host the search engine for you, but you can also embed the code to create a nice search engine on your own site. Blekko lets you 'slashtag' the web by creating a self defined /slashtag that you can link to specific sites, and Blekko will limit its search to those sites. You can publicise the slashtag to friends and colleagues.

I'm not aware of any other examples, but if you do happen to know of any, please comment!

Learning with Learnist

You may recall that I mentioned Learnist the other day, which is a tool that allows you to create learning boards, by adding content from websites, YouTube video, your own content and so on. At the time I wasn't able to do much since my invite hadn't come through, but now it has, and I've had a go with it. You can take a look at my short test board: Urban Exploring or URBEX | Learnist

I found it really easy to use - give your board a title, click it into a category, and then start adding stuff. This is made easier by the little 'Learn It!' book marklet that you can pop into your browser. You can then simply add stuff as you find it. In this case it's very much like Squidoo although each segment is much larger, rather than a single line of text, it's a board in its own right. Visitors can add comments and share via social media as you would expect.

All told - simple and easy. It would appeal to students and educators alike. Take a look, and see what you think.

Finding 'Bing it on'

Oh dear, this is a bit embarassing. Earlier today I mentioned the 'Bing it on' search taste test resource that Microsoft has created to show everyone that Bing is better than Google. You can find it at http://www.bingiton.com/ which is a nice simple and easy to find URL. Of course, if you don't know this, you're going to have to find it, and the obvious place to start is going to be Bing - isn't it?

Umm, no. It's not. Do a search for bing it on, and you get a news item about it, a link to Bing the search engine, a link to the Wikipedia page, and so on. In fact, it's not even on the first page of results. Or the second. Or the third, fourth, fifth and I admit, I gave up at the sixth page of results. Hmmmm, what to do next? How about trying Google... Can we guess? Yes, it's the very first result.

Microsoft - it's stuff like that which is just plain embarassing. If you can't get your own links right, and we have to rely on the opposition to point us in the right direction, how are people ever going to believe you're serious?

FindSounds

OK, it's almost 19.00 on a Friday night, and you're desperate to get the sound that a zebra makes. (Don't ask why, you just are, work with me on this!) Where do you go? I'll tell you, you go to  FindSounds - Sound Types which is quite a funky little website. Along with the sounds of animals (including that zebra) you get hundreds of sounds. For example - there's not just one zebra sound, there are ten different ones. This is going to be zebra heaven for someone, you mark my words.

If you don't like zebras, try cannons, 19 different saxaphone sounds,  if you want to get really gross, there's 24 vomit sounds, 200 different Star Trek sounds, Scooby Doo's laugh, and dozens of others. You can Tweet them, listen to similar sounds and email them. Lots of fun for a friday evening.

Google reducing the number of search results

Noticed anything different about your Google results recently? It might be down to the fact that instead of seeing 10 results on the screen, you're now quite probably only seeing 7. I really don't see the point of doing this, although their reasoning is that if the search is specific enough to warrant less results, that's what you'll get. It's yet another example of Google deciding that it knows best. Here's an example searching for CILIP:

If you think that's bad enough, Google would appear to be experimenting with the idea of simply showing up 4 results on a page, as reported by SERoundTable Now, perhaps I'm cynical, but I just don't believe this is Google trying to be helpful - I think it's more to do with the idea that if they show less results per page, we scroll through more pages, and may consequently end up seeing more advertising.

Whatever the reason - it's a poor idea, and I hope that Google comes to their senses quickly!